Pathfinder Player Companion: Wilderness Origins

Harness the unstoppable force and life-giving power of the natural world! Pathfinder Player Companion: Wilderness Origins provides new options for those who peacefully coexist with their environments. Learn the magical secrets of the wilderness, tame fierce allies, and channel the awesome destructive power of nature and the elements, from the deadly rush of a flash flood to the inferno of a forest fire!

Inside this book you'll find:

Options for the shifter class, including new animal aspects, feats to augment the shifter's animal forms, and archetypes that channel the fury of dragons or the power of fey!

Racial traits, feats, and archetypes for the vine leshy, gathlain, and ghoran that allow them to further leverage their inherent connection to the verdant power of nature!

New player options for characters who draw their inspiration from nature, from witches who draw on the magic of wildflowers to summoners and spiritualists who bargain with kami!

This Pathfinder Player Companion is intended for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Pathfinder Campaign Setting, but it can easily be incorporated into any fantasy world.

Average product rating:

Wilderness Power!

The dragon shifter archetype could have been better(No Form of the Dragon III?), in fact I still don't understand why they didn't take away any of the nature themed abilities for more dragon related options. Also it would have been nice for the dragon and fey archetypes to use charisma instead of wisdom for AC or at least get a feat for it. Other then that the book has a lot of great options like alternate natural attacks for the shifter, animal companion archetypes, kineticist wild talents, flower power, etc..

Tons of cool options

Let's get it out of the way. The Dragonblood Shifter archetype is bad. (To be more specific, introduces a large gap in your advancement, and fails to live up to builds trying to accomplish similar things.) Just set that aside.

The Feyform Shifter more than makes up for it, though. Minor Aspect becomes a central combat ability now, and you now consistently get something before the Druid does, all while keeping weak versions of the basic class's abilities. Furthermore, Shifter gets a bunch of content for the base class. New aspects, some interesting feats (finally combine major forms!), and free alternatives to claws better in keeping with different aspects.

New animal companion and familiar archetypes (one of the coolest parts- all three familiar archetypes are ones I'll strongly consider every time), plus a feat for a speaking familiar, or a shapeshifting familiar!

Cool Oracle curses, new racial options, a trait to eat raw meat, and at least one hex that is probably a little too good for a basic hex.

Also impressive is the quality of the feats. It's a really good ratio of things I'll seriously consider on characters, rather than just a few gems.

"new rules and options for the new player races"
I'll admit that I'm very curious about these new player races. Part of thinks this is an exaggeration and it's just more alternate traits to make them look new, but I'd love to be proven wrong. You can never have too many race options.

And just to be part of this little quarrel, 5e has dominated our book stores and has for about a year now. We went from one table of Adventurer's League and six tables of PFS, to one table of PFS and five tables of 5e home games. I'd say a third of the store's shelves are just 5e books and Pathfinder has one individual book case with dust collecting on it. And we're just a small town. *shrugs* People like what they like. I did my part to recruit, but things just worked out like they did.

The full text of that phrase is "for the new player races and shifter base class from Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Wilderness", so the races in question would be gathlains, ghorans, and vine leshies.

Fair enough. I have an honest to goodness reading interpretation disability so I didn't read that as one thing, but two separate. Good to know. Little bit disappointed because I love seeing new races, but that's fine.

I am more interested in Ranger and Druid options which I can probably safely assume this will include. I am waiting with baited breath for the UW paperback edition to come out as I love the hardcover and often refer to it or the pdf for campaign ideas. I am another that is of the opinion that UW was the best hard cover Paizo produced for PF1. I am going to keep an eye on when this releases as well as the soft cover of Ultimate Intrigue as I enjoyed that book quite bit as well.

At least two more PF1 Player Companion volumes (Heroes of Golarion and Chronicles of Legends) have been announced for this line after this one. I have no idea whether there will be yet one more after the known volumes in July, but that would be the last possible time for additional PF1 material from Paizo before the edition transition at GenCon.

I wonder if the new shifter archetypes will interact with the FAQ/errata changes to the shifter, or if they will simply use the class as printed to avoid confusion for those that have not see the changes.

I wonder if the new shifter archetypes will interact with the FAQ/errata changes to the shifter, or if they will simply use the class as printed to avoid confusion for those that have not see the changes.

Ultimate Wilderness got its last FAQ on February 13th, so they have had sufficient time to adjust the Shifter archetypes in Wilderness Origins appropriately.

Great to see more support for the Shifter before the PF1 line ends. Thank you Paizo! I hope there are some more reactive forms for the adaptive shifter archetype. I really like the direction they went with that archetype.